September 11 is also our birthday

By Sneha Dhandapani, CNN

(CNN) — Lindsay Cadillac had baked her own 16th birthday cake, heart-shaped with white-and-pink frosting, and put it in the fridge the night before: September 10, 2001.

The next night, what was there to do? She held the cake up, her face stricken, as a big TV behind her replayed smoke billowing from the Twin Towers. Her father snapped a photo.

In 2006, she posted the photo to MySpace and to Facebook. A decade later, a friend took Cadillac’s post to Twitter. From there, other users picked it up and started making and spreading memes with it, until it had amassed millions of views across social media platforms.

My own family plans to cut into two cakes this September 11: one to celebrate my 22nd birthday, and another for my parents’ 24th wedding anniversary. They were married in South India, on a day the Hindu calendar declared to be auspicious. Two years later, I was born, on their wedding date and into a much larger and more somber coincidence.

Before 2001, September 11 was one of the more common birth dates in the United States, coming as it does near the annual late-summer surge in births. Now enough would-be parents avoid the date, when they have the choice of scheduling delivery, that the birth rate dips on the 11th.

Even so, there are plenty of us born on September 11, and plenty of other people who booked their weddings for the fine, sunny period right after Labor Day. What is it like to have your personal celebration tied to a day of national mourning? On Zoom, I brought together Cadillac and a group of people to talk about their experience with the fraught date and how it’s changed over the past 25 years.

An unconventional birthday tradition

Adsel Sparrow, who was born in 2001, wore a birthday crown to school while her teachers grappled with how to teach the infamous “9/11 lesson.” Many of those birthdays were spent watching archival news footage.

But even prior to receiving any formal education about the attacks, Sparrow knew September 11 was a “special day” because of how the tone of radio broadcasts would change on her birthday.

“Every other day it’d be happy news and music and then on my birthday it’d be like, ‘On this day 3,000 people died, and people lost their lives, and we’ve gone into a war, and it was the most depressing news,’” Sparrow said.

Each year, Susan Ramage revisits what she was doing on September 11, 2001: shutting herself in her dorm room on her 18th birthday. Ramage’s family couldn’t get in touch with her brother, who worked in the Pentagon.

Fortunately, her brother had taken a vacation day, but the attacks weren’t so far away for Ramage, who lived about two hours outside Washington, DC. The anniversary still brings a “twinge of guilt and a dose of sadness” that she doesn’t expect will ever go away, she said.

Ramage stopped watching television on September 11 for a while.

“Depending on if we’re nearing a significant anniversary, a five-year, a 10-year, a 15-year, people amp it up a little more,” Ramage said. “They try and remember a little more, and then I feel like it does dampen the spirits even that much more.”

“It was constantly watching death on the day that we were born,” Cadillac said about watching the footage.

Making room for celebration

Rather than marking the occasion on September 11 itself, Ramage said she tends to celebrate her birthday on an adjacent day under the guise of a “scheduling conflict.” She has found it “awkward” to publicly celebrate, especially in the years that immediately followed the attacks.

“It was a very weird experience to just be like, ‘Oh, I’m going to go get my first drink at 21, and then everybody’s talking about where they were on 9/11,’” Cadillac added.

“All of a sudden, the conversation turns from happy birthday to morbid, and not to be selfish when it’s your birthday, the conversation’s no longer about you, the birthday girl,” Sparrow said. “It’s shifted completely. While everyone deserves to be remembered and the day deserves to be remembered, it’s a little hard to be like, ‘Well, but this was my celebration.’”

It can be difficult to mark happy occasions on a day that is synonymous with a national tragedy, but some people have found ways to reclaim September 11 as a date that has personal meaning for them.

Brian and Heather Rayburn, who were married in 1999, have been asked by friends, family and strangers to change their anniversary date dozens of times. A few years ago, Brian expressed that he was tired of it. The couple used to celebrate on September 10 and 12. This year, they decided to celebrate on September 10, 11 and 12, thus lengthening the celebration.

Anish Shrivastava was born in New Jersey on September 11, 2001. His uncle would have been at the World Trade Center if he hadn’t taken the day off for Shrivastava’s birth. “The day doesn’t just have to be about the tragedy that happened,” Shrivastava said. “It could also be about hope and coming together.”

Everyone has a 9/11 story

A September 11 birthday supersedes your identity every time you take out a driver’s license or fill out a voter registration form.

The bouncer at my college bar would slap a hand over his chest while looking at my driver’s license and loudly proclaim, “Never forget!” Other times, especially in New York, a mention of my birthday is an unsolicited invitation for someone’s father’s “9/11 story.”

Those kinds of stories “blur together” for Cadillac. “I know that kind of sounds terrible, but at a certain point I have almost mental blinders up to the unsolicited trauma dumping. There is only so much of it you can take,” she wrote in a message after our group Zoom call.

We have all received 9/11-themed happy birthday texts over the past quarter-century: “Happy birthday, you weirdo. How dare you celebrate?” “Adsel crashed into the world as the Twin Towers crashed down.” “Happy birthday. Never forget.”

Like me, most of my friends have no memory of the September 11 attacks. But they’ve verbalized how they couldn’t forget my birthday because the date is in the headlines every year.

Ramage’s birthday was referred to as a “911 emergency” long before the attacks. The only response was to celebrate, and her friends have kept that going since 2001.

“Some of my friends are like, ‘It’s even more of an emergency now than it ever was, and we have to make sure that we still celebrate you and don’t lose you in the rest of it,’” Ramage said.

Our Zoom conversation ended with everyone sharing how we plan to celebrate our birthdays and anniversaries this year. The Rayburns will go whitewater rafting. Cadillac has booked a deep tissue massage with her husband. Sparrow will enjoy a pie this weekend (rhubarb, if she can find it). Shrivastava will host a small birthday dinner.

There’ll still be conversations surrounding the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, and most of us anticipate a lot of shocked reactions from those learning when our birthdays and wedding anniversaries take place.

But the celebrations will continue. As Cadillac said, she’s learned to reclaim her birthday amid reminders of a tragedy.

“It’s my birthday. I still mattered.”

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